Skunk Works Rotman Magazine

SKUNK WORKS: HOW BREAKING AWAY FUELS BREAKTHROUGHS In the world’s most innovative companies, ‘Skunk Works’ has become the standard for running top secret projects with elite special teams. by Matthew E. May IF YOU HEAD NORTH FROM LOS ANGELES ON INTERSTATE 5, hang a Skunk Works is, and has been since its inception under Kelly dur- right on the Antelope Valley Freeway toward Palmdale and the ing World II, Lockheed’s top-secret Advanced Development Pro- Mojave Desert, and cut east past the Antelope Valley Coun- gram. try Club, you’ll run into the Sierra Highway, off which you can Kelly Johnson ran Lockheed’s innovative entity for nearly 45 see Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works building, not far from Air years, from its inception in 1943 to 1975, when he turned the reins Force Plant 42 and Edwards Air Force Base. You’ll know you’re in over to his longtime right-hand man, friend, and protégé, the late the right place because you’ll see a white building with a cartoon Ben ‘Stealth’ Rich, whose memoir Skunk Works remains the de- skunk on it — the Skunk Works logo. finitive thesis on the Lockheed program. As you drive around, you’ll see a good bit of barbed wire, a It was the appearance of Germany’s first jet fighter planes in high concrete wall, and plenty of ‘No Access’ signs. You’ll see an the skies over Europe that prompted the U.S. War Department F-104 Starfighter on display near the main entrance off Lockheed in 1943 to knock on the door of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, Way and pass Kelly’s Way, named for Lockheed’s legendary chief headquartered in Burbank, California, next to the Burbank air- engineer, Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. port. Lockheed actually owned the airport and had gone to great No matter how hard you try, or how many times you call the lengths to conceal the entire area from Japanese air reconnais- Lockheed Martin public relations office, you will not get inside. sance. An enormous burlap tarp painted to depict a suburban Rotman Magazine Spring 2013 / 53 ‘Skunk Works’ refers to any effort that involves an elite special team that breaks away from the larger organization to work autonomously on an advanced or secret project. neighborhood camouflaged the factory, adorned with artificial tory, figuring that the overwhelmingodor would help keep ‘nosy trees, buildings, and cars (made of rubber) to give it a three-di- parkers’ away. mensional effect. The whole setup reminded people of Al Capp’s L’il Abner For the War Department, there was just one man for the comic strip, and the ‘Skonk Works’, a dilapidated factory on the job: 33-year-old Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s talented but eccentric remote outskirts of Capp’s fictional backwoods town. In the com- chief engineer. In the eyes of Lockheed CEO Robert Gross, John- ic, scores of Dogpatch locals were done in every year by the toxic son “walked on water,” and had done so since he told Lockheed fumes of concentrated ‘skonk oil’, which was brewed and barreled engineers ten years earlier that the design of their twin-engine daily by grinding dead skunks and worn shoes into a constantly commercial plane, called the Electra, was seriously flawed. At the smoldering still for a purpose that Capp never disclosed. time, Kelly was a 23-year old engineering student at the University One day, a designer picked up a ringing phone and answered of Michigan, where the Electra prototype was being tested in the it with, “Skonk Works.” The name stuck, and it wasn’t long before school’s wind tunnel. even those working at the main Lockheed plant were calling it Kelly contradicted his professors and informed Lockheed that, too. Over the next 15 years, Skonk Works became part of the engineers in no uncertain terms that if one of the Electra’s engines Lockheed lexicon. In 1960, when Al Capp’s publisher objected to went out, the plane would go down. Not only did Kelly correct the Lockheed’s use of the name, rather than abandon it, they changed design flaw, he did so with an unconventional twin-tail design that it to Skunk Works and registered both the name and the cartoon would become the Lockheed signature. The plane saved Lock- skunk logo as trademarks, thus becoming the official alias of the heed and revolutionized aviation in the 1930s. Johnson’s star rose, Lockheed Advanced Development Program. and he became the go-to guy on everything from aerodynamics to In the years since, the term ‘skunk works’ has come to refer flight testing, including flying the planes he built; he declared that to any effort that involves anelite special team that breaks away unless he scared himself nearly to death once a year in a cockpit, from the larger organization to work autonomously on an ad- he wouldn’t have the proper perspective to design good planes. vanced or secret project, usually tasked with breakthrough inno- Johnson took all of three days in the late 1930s to transform vation on a limited budget and under aggressive timelines. The the Electra into a bomber for the British Royal Air Force. Called term has even become official, and is defined in the fourth edition the Hudson, it was so successful that England ordered 3,000 of of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as “an them. Kelly’s colleagues were so awestruck by his design skills often secret experimental laboratory or facility for producing in- that they swore he could actually see air. novative products, as in the computer or aerospace field.” In 1939, Johnson designed and built the only American Perhaps it was the stink that drove Johnson’s secret team to fighter plane in production throughout U.S. involvement in World design and build the prototype for the P-80 Shooting Star—nick- War II: the P-38 Lightning Interceptor. If you’ve seen World War named Lulu Belle—in a mere 143 days, 37 days ahead of schedule. II footage, you’ve seen the P-38: it’s the twin-propeller plane with Although World War II ended before the jet fighter could prove the funny-looking twin-boom tail design. It was the most maneu- itself, Lockheed produced nearly 9,000 during the lead-up to the verable propeller plane of the war and played several roles. But Korean War. The P-80, later called the F-80, won the first all-jet the P-38 was no match for Germany’s new jet fighters. The War dogfight over the skies above North Korea. Department needed a new plane, and fast. Given the success of the P-80 project, Lockheed manage- Challenging constraints shaped the project: build a jet fight- ment agreed to let Johnson keep his elite design and development er prototype that would fly at 600 miles per hour — the edge of team running, as long as it did not interfere in any way with his the speed of sound and 200 miles per hour faster than the cur- primary duties as Lockheed’s chief engineer and was kept on a rent Lockheed P-38 propeller plane — in just 180 days. The only shoestring budget. Kelly hand-selected a few of the brightest de- problem was that Lockheed was out of floor space, as the entire signers and moved into a building known only as ‘Building 82’. complex was devoted to 24/7 production of their current planes. Skunk Works would remain there until it moved operations out to The jet fighter project was to beconducted with top secre- California’s Mojave desert in 1994. Johnson split his time between cy, and so the space constraint was something Kelly decided to the main Lockheed plant and Building 82, usually turning his at- leverage. He rented a large circus tent, borrowed 23 of the best tention to Skunk Works in the latter part of each day. design engineers and 30 shop mechanics from Lockheed’s main “Those guys brainstormed what-if? questions about the fu- operation, and set up camp next to a foul-smelling plastics fac- ture needs of commercial and military aircraft,” writes Ben Rich. 54 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2013 “And if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experi- ing a single fundamental belief: don’t build an airplane you don’t mental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could believe in. His principles: first, it’s more important to listen than find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead to talk; second, even a timely wrong decision is better than no de- was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.” cision; and third, don’t halfheartedly wound problems—kill them There was nothing fancy about the Skunk Works space. In dead. fact, Johnson preferred to keep things as spare as possible. When Over time, Kelly developed 14 ‘rules’ for all Skunk Works Ben Rich was lent out temporarily to Johnson in 1954, little did he projects as a way to put his core belief and basic principles into know that he would never leave. He describes his first impression practice. Half of these rules (with a few word substitutions) can of the space as being nearly as eccentric as Kelly himself: be applied to virtually any Skunk Works project, and they pre- scribe a robust framework within which to operate in an innova- The office space allocated to the Skunk Works operation tive environment: was a narrow hallway off the main production floor crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, 1.

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